Surgical fasteners such as staples, clips, clamps, bands, tacks, or other wound or incision closure devices are commonly used in surgical procedures to allow a surgeon to fasten, secure and/or repair body tissue. Examples of surgical fasteners are given in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,994,073 or 4,950,284 or 4,934,364 and 4,932,960.
Surgical fasteners have been used in surgical procedures to eliminate the need for suturing, which is both time consuming and inconvenient. In these applications the surgeon often uses a fastener implanting device loaded with one or more surgical fasteners to accomplish in a few seconds what would have taken many minutes to perform by suturing. This reduction in operating time reduces blood loss and trauma to the patient.
Typically, such fastening systems have been used mainly for the closure of incisions or wounds, or to fasten tissues together. A surgical fastening system that could be used with a number of types of implantable devices would be beneficial for surgeons. Currently, surgical devices that incorporate fastening systems often use extremely specialized systems that may be unnecessarily complicated and are unsuitable for adaptation to other applications. As a result, the majority of implantable devices are secured with sutures. For example, when inserting a gastric band and the associated access port, the port is sutured into place with 4 to 5 sutures against the rectus muscle sheath. Such placement of the sutures is often challenging because the ports are placed below several inches of fat, and suturing the port often takes as long as placing the band itself. An improved fastening system would allow easy, one-step attachment with security equivalent to the sutured device.
The present invention overcomes such problems in the art.